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Is Your Dream Worth the Pain?
My paternal grandfather kept a regular journal. He also held onto things of particular interest to him. Some time after his passing in 2011, my dad was searching through grandpa’s things and found a time-worn piece of paper with a quote scrawled across it in my grandpa’s handwriting:
The heights by great men reached and kept were not attained by sudden flight, but they, while their companions slept, were toiling upward in the night.
It’s one of those quotes that falls into the overuse category among productivity gurus.
For many of them, the mantra is that you won’t get anywhere in life unless you’re burning both ends of the candle with the midnight oil.
There is no question, achieving anything requires effort. Often, to accomplish anything extraordinary requires enormous effort.
Emily Dickinson — the prolific American poet — wrote some 1,800 poems during her 55 years. Nearly all of those poems never saw the light of day, and those that did were often heavily edited; some even published without proper credit. In fact, evidence suggests that only 10 poems and a single letter were published during her lifetime with proper attribution.
It wasn’t until some years after her passing that Emily’s sister Lavinia discovered her work and made it her life’s ambition to get them published.
Lavinia died before that work was complete, but between about 1890 and 1945, most of Emily’s poems were published. In the 80 years since, Emily Dickinson has been recognized as one of the most influential American poets ever.
Dickinson poured her heart and soul into her poetry but with no audience in mind, it seems. She accomplished something great with singular focus and unrelenting drive. Did she identify, like so many of the creative minds of the last five hundred years, as one who is compelled, almost as though they don’t have a choice?
I’m not suggesting that we use Ms. Dickinson’s accomplishments as a measuring stick for our own ambitions, but even in the pursuit of a moderately difficult goal, there will always be tradeoffs in accomplishing it.
- For the first-time…
